For a thousand years the United Kingdom was free, independent and trading with the rest of the known world.

For the past 40 years, the United Kingdom has been part of the European Union (EEC and EC). The UK’s ability to act as a nation state is being increasingly constricted to the point where the EU now dominates the UK. Some independence is left, importantly the British currency, but every day more power and more control ebbs away to Brussels.

Since the days of Edward Heath, all British governments of whichever party have assumed and continue to assume that Britain must be at the heart of Europe. They even claim that the UK can have a positive influence, beyond its limited voting powers, to change the EU for the better, that is towards a free market group of nations co-operating together.

Doubters maintain loudly that the UK is too small to prosper outside the EU, too small to go it alone. Yet that belies our history, it belies the facts of our global trade and it belies the strength of our country. It is also an insult to most countries of the world, smaller than the UK, which remain independent and free.

Propagandists claim the EU will safeguard peace in Europe, yet creating a political and economic union of disparate and diverse countries within a generation or two creates fissures and tensions that could erupt into serious and widespread civil unrest and has already done so in Greece.

Yet the financial costs alone are huge, the regulatory costs restrict and even destroy British trade, farming and fishing. It is no exaggeration to say that more than a million jobs have been lost because of Britain’s membership of the EU. How much more than a million? No one knows. No meaningful cost-benefit analysis has ever been done.

The Better Off Out campaign is here to encourage, support and promote a great national debate on this most critical issue of our time. It is here to counter the narrow propaganda of the last decades, which has so sapped our national strength to be independent. It is here to promote British freedom and prosperity.